Interesting to see Schiller acknowledge outright that Face ID won’t work for twins, when Microsoft’s face recognition has been touted as differentiating them in most cases. (Of course, “most cases” is problematically vague.)

There is a scene, one third of the way into Ancillary Justice, where the protagonist and narrator explains her goals and motivations to another character. That scene takes place off-page, and the reader will only begin to learn that information another hundred pages later. This is only the most egregious example; there are tons of details that the author only explains fifty pages too late.

I’ve read a lot of science-fiction and I’m perfectly fine with the “figure it out yourself” style of world-building, but this is different — this is trying to be Lost or Westworld, deliberate opaque, ostensibly hiding things from the audience. And that’s fine on TV but it doesn’t work at all, for me, in a book told in the first person; that just makes the narrator incredibly obnoxious.

Still, the book and its story are pretty clever, you have to love how much attention it pays to subtext and subtly expressed emotions, and the portrayal of One Esk is well thought-out and interesting. But I don’t remember ever being so annoyed at a book I couldn’t put down.

My first Heat Signature character was soon “captured” (with a bullet, there was a lot of blood everywhere, but okay sure it’s sci-fi). My second character’s life goal slash loyalty mission is to free the first, who was his life partner, so basically I’ve been guilt-tripped into playing the game forever* now, well done.

* Actually, now that I’m writing this, I’m curious what happens when I “kill” the second character — does the chain end, or were they poly?

Long wondered which draws more power—wired or bluetooth headphones. Well, assuming Apple chose to display the most advantageous measures, I guess wireless is more economical than even the phone’s speaker.

Unless I’m missing something you can’t restrict a listing to friends-of-friends on Facebook Marketplace, and that’s missing the entire point of the feature — I want to sell/buy stuff, not to/from complete strangers, so I naturally go to Facebook and… nope.

The limited rollout for 280-character tweets means power users will spend weeks complaining while regular users — those who’d benefit most from an easier way to express themselves, those Twitter wants to win over — will never get to enjoy it before it’s cancelled.

If Japanese users are privileged on Twitter, so are English speakers. The better and more specific your writing is, the shorter your words get. That’s how editing down to 140 chars becomes something to take pride in. But it doesn’t work that way at all in most other languages.

Don’t tell anyone I said this about (1) a ‘competitor’ and (2) a double tab-bar hierarchy, but I think Hornet’s new UI structure makes a lot of sense for them. (I still hate the ‘Follow’ buttons and related social positioning.)